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38 fain to accept peace on their own terms from the virtual conquerors of Oudh.

When the news of Munro's victory reached Calcutta, Hastings resigned his seat in Council and made ready for the voyage home to the land where his only child, shipped off three years earlier, lay slowly dying under his aunt's care. Nothing but the outbreak of war with Kásim had prevented him from throwing up the Company's service in the middle of 1763. Vansittart also was glad to retire at such a moment from a post which had brought him little honour and vexations without end. In November the two sailed homewards together in His Majesty's ship Medway.

After a residence of fourteen years in India, Warren Hastings was still a poor man by comparison with other 'Nabobs' of his own standing. Of the modest fortune which he had scraped together, not a rupee appears to have been obtained by methods which in those days could have been called irregular. While men like Drake, Holwell, Clive, Vansittart, Carnac, made their thousands at one stroke out of the needs or the gratitude of native princes; while the Company's servants of all grades grew rich on bribes and perquisites drawn from native merchants, placemen, and landholders — Hastings kept proudly aloof from the general scramble for sordid or ill-gotten gains. To any one breathing an atmosphere so tainted, the temptation to enrich himself by whatever means must have been very cogent; nor had Vansittart's ablest colleague forgotten the purpose formed by the dreamy